Handling Error Messages

robeano,

Some good catches on your part, first of all.

I'm going to do this in stages. First, try this code for civinode_util_group_contacts() instead:

/**
 * Wrapper for getting back an array of contact ids.
 *
 * @ingroup CiviCRM_Groups
 * @param int $gid CiviCRM group ID
 * @param int $start index of first record 
 * @param int $num_recs number of records to pull. 0 is "all records"
 *
 */
function civinode_util_group_contacts($gid, $start = 0, $num_recs = 0){
  if (!civinode_check_init()){
    watchdog('CRM', t('CiviCRM must be installed for CiviNode'), WATCHDOG_ERROR);
    return NULL;
  }
  $groups = array( $gid => 1);
  $params = array( 'group' => $groups );
  $returnProperties = array('contact_id' => 1);
  $limit = $num_recs ? $num_recs : 1000; 
  $contacts = crm_contact_search($params, $returnProperties, NULL, $start, $limit);
  $list = array();
  foreach($contacts[0] as $contact){
    $list[] = $contact['contact_id'];
  }
  return $list;
}

This code *should* allow you to do what you want: show contacts to the anonymous user, as long as you've set up permissions so that the anonymous user has access rights to the group. This code also works for smart groups, which the old code never did. It also should not return an error, since if a group does not exist, it will simply return no contacts.

If it fails, it's a permissions issue within CiviCRM itself, and you or I will need to log an issue in JIRA against 1.7.

I'm looking at the rest of your issues now as well, and will add a comment when I'm through them.

As for the error handling related issues:

1) You're completely correct about the $lastError and $last_error business. Fixed.

2) I like the fact that civinode_get_last_error() returns a string, but I see your point. So here's what I propose:

• I'm accepting your code to change civinode_check_error() to save away the error object itself, rather than just the message.
• civinode_get_last_error() now extracts the string itself, so it behaves the same way it should have before
• I've added a new API call, civinode_get_last_error_object(), which will give you back the raw error object. Note that its structure is a little more complex than your sample code suggests. I suspect you really want to get back $err_obj->_errors[0] if I understand your example. But the new call will give you all the info you need to do something more informative.

I'm posting this as a patch. Try it out, and if it works for you, I'll check it in and create a new packages tag for it.

I was mostly worried about the change to the groups code (due to the bug you found, the old error reporting code clearly never worked anyway), so I'm going to complete the check-in.

Thanks for giving the code a good looking over. I've generated a 5.x-1.1 version, and it should be up in a couple of minutes.

Rob